Daily Archives: April 22, 2018

What a crazy weather week!!! Even with the cold and snow, the kids loved running/walking laps on the track for Mileage Club and playing on the 2nd/3rd grade playground. It was good practice for next year!! :) I can’t believe these sweet first graders are going to be big second graders in only seven more weeks!!!

April 22 – Earth Day

April 24 – Library Day

April 24 – Art Show Reception @ 5:30-7:30

April 24 – Culver’s Night @ 5-8

Come have a yummy dinner or dessert and support our school! Many of the Georgetown teachers and staff will be there to deliver the food to your table or car.

April 27 – Math Assessment

April 27 – Spelling Sentence Dictation

Reading:

We began a new reading unit this week as we set off on an ADVENTURE with the characters in our fiction books. Our books can take us anywhere – the beach, the mountains, a treehouse, a tea party and so many more places. We want our first graders to be excited about reading because of all the adventures they can go on and places their reading can take them!!

So we “packed up our suitcases” with some reading strategies and took off on our adventure! As we were getting ready to go, we talked about one of our familiar strategies “take a sneak peek”. We can learn so much about our book by studying the front cover, reading any information on the back, and checking out the chapter titles before we read.

As we read more and more of our books, we noticed that our characters often move to different places and the time changes too!! We want to be aware of a change in setting, so we looked for clues in the pictures and words to help us stay right on track.

Finally, we worked on making predictions about what might happen next. We had fun guessing the next action in some new books with our favorite characters!

We are excited to dig deeper into our adventures next week!

Writing:

This week in writing, we began Realistic Fiction. We started on Monday by making up a pretend character, thinking of a realistic first grade problem, and a solution to the character’s problem.

We want to make sure we are thinking of real problems like having a wiggly tooth, scrapping a knee on the playground, or getting a bee sting. Once we plan our story across our fingers, then we quickly sketch the story on our paper before we get to work writing the words.

We learned how to write a lead to our story by setting the scene, telling who, what, and where about our characters, and adding a detail to the first page. For example…

We ended the week by learning about how we should end our stories. We need to make sure that we solve the problem in our story on the last page and to end our book with a lesson that was learned.

Gretchen felt safe.She learned to go inside whenever there was a thunderstorm.

Math:

This week, we transitioned to solving comparison stories. Our first graders learned a new strategy called: COMPARISON BARS. Comparison bars are a visual tool for solving stories in which two amounts are compared and the difference (magic number) is either known or unknown. Check out the examples below:

Thank you (ahead of time) for helping your child on his or her homework pages this week. Be sure to check their work. This new strategy is tricky and sometimes our first graders are unsure about where the known information should go. (If the magic number or the difference is known, the information always goes inside the oval.) We will review more comparison stories next week and then we will wrap up Unit 6 with an assessment.